


The Trials and Tribulations of Unexpected Cat-sitting

by springbok7



Series: The Trials and Tribulations of Unexpected Cat-sitting [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Author has no update schedule, Bad Scene Etiquette, Clint and Natasha's history, Consequences of abuse, Gen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Past Canonical Violence, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Red Room, Past Sexual Abuse, Past Torture, Phil lands on his feet and keeps his head, Tags May Change, Thankfully Phil knows his shit, Work In Progress, You Have Been Warned, mentions of past trauma, non-negotiated scene, non-sexual pet play
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-28 16:04:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15710604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/springbok7/pseuds/springbok7
Summary: After almost six months of missions without a proper break, Director Fury begrudgingly gives Coulson, Barton, and Romanova a week off. Clint and Natasha decide to take a trip and need someone to watch their cats. They ask Phil. He questions his sanity, checks for pranks, and then agrees. How hard can it be to watch two cats? Maybe he can get some work done and finish up reading through that pile of reports, sitting on his desk for almost a month.But nothing is ever quite as it seems with those two and apparently Phil missed the full disclosure meeting. But he's got his big boy pants on, he can deal.Right?





	The Trials and Tribulations of Unexpected Cat-sitting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dassandre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dassandre/gifts), [AsheTarasovich (natalieashe)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/natalieashe/gifts), [Boffin1710](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Boffin1710/gifts).



> I swore I'd never post another WIP (looks at poor Childhood Bed sadly) but my soul-sister is dealing with some truly awful RL bullshit and there is precious little I can do at the moment to fix things that cannot be fixed, or heal what cannot be healed. She is too far away -- and there's a spot of water between to boot -- for me to hug properly, so I'm hoping that some soothing fic might soften the sharp edges, at least a little. Love, I hope this helps. You know where to find me when you need me. ♡ ♡ ♡
> 
> To my soul-brothers, sorry-not-sorry, this ain't exactly my 'usual' angst, but there is a ton of assorted shite that got these people to where they are, and the journey has been far from smooth. I hope you enjoy the pit-stop-peek. You both can use some tender these days, too, yeah? Love you both! ♡ ♡ ♡  
>  
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> * * *
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> Disclaimer: this is one of the pieces sitting in my "writing pile" that I pull out every few months and add a bit to, here and there. Sometimes I get inspired and get a chapter written, and sometimes the poor kittens loaf around for weeks or months with no attention whatsoever. Therefor there is no schedule for posting, and I have no way to know when I'll finish this. I will, however, finish it. Eventually. Please bear that in mind before consuming.  
>   
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> * * *
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> Portions of this work have been beta-ed by the incomparable [Dassandre](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Dassandre). All remaining errors and typos are mine. Please feel free to let me know if you spot any and/or feel there should be additional tags. I welcome constructive criticism, but neither support nor feed trolls.  
>   
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> * * *
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> A special thank you to [Tsuyu](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Tsuyu) for enlisting maternal aid to get the names of the cats sorted out, and correct.  
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> * * *
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>  _I do not own these characters. No infringement of copyright is intended and no profit is being made from this piece of fan-fiction._

Phil Coulson leaned back in his admittedly very comfortable office chair and stared at the email presently open on his computer. He looked up at the ceiling, but the vent in the middle showed no sign of a lurking agent, nor when he glanced at the door did he see a smirking Russian redhead.

It was Monday, and his week was starting off with its typical chaotic messes either left over from the previous week or having been brewing over the weekend. He wouldn't have put it past the two agents to have been pranking him, but all seemed quiet in the immediate vicinity.

For now.

He crossed his arms and frowned at the email. He hadn't even known that Barton and Romanova owned cats. He knew they lived together. Everyone knew they lived together. But no one knew the nature of their relationship other than that they had the kind of professional partnership most agents only dreamt of and that they were a handler's wet dream. A wet dream that could instantly morph into a nightmare if anyone were foolish enough to try and separate the partnership. Or assign them to any handler other than Coulson.

Phil had no real idea why, but Barton and Romanova flatly refused to let anyone else run their missions. And frankly speaking, after a fourth seasoned handler begged to be transferred, he couldn't argue with the Director's orders permanently placing them under Phil's control. They never did anything overly traumatising to the hapless handlers but enough small but terrifying incidents occurred, leading to quickly requested reassignment.

Coulson really couldn’t refuse. He had, after all, been the one who made the decision to recruit Barton rather than send him off to a potentially lengthy and unproductive stint in jail.

A series of sometimes impossible-seeming murders -- assassinations, really -- had spanned well over a decade, scattered around the country but obviously linked since each killshot consisted of an arrow through the victim's eye. The regular authorities had been baffled and when the case was turned over to SHIELD, no one had complained overly much.

SHIELD, being SHIELD, with its extensive history of… unusual… phenomenon, approached the case cautiously, assuming nothing but braced for the strange and the unexplainable.

Phil's surprise at the eventual perpetrator was easy to understand:  when his team finally managed to track Barton down, he turned out to be a 20-something kid with nothing special about him other than excellent eyesight, a better than average brain, and a well-defined physique -- the product of old-fashioned sweat and effort.  He was a fully human kid with enough sass and bravado combined with a prankster nature to conceal the fact that his weaponry and acrobatic skills had been hard-won as child-apprentice to the infamous Trick Shot and Swordsman of the Carson Carnival of Traveling Wonders.

Of course, Coulson hadn't known that at the time; initially, the only lead Phil and his team had been able to discover was that for the first decade the murders always seemed to occur within a hundred miles of where the Carnival was set up, and that one of the acts within it was a pair of archers, a man and a boy. After that first decade, there hadn't seemed to be any connection whatsoever between the victims and the Carnival. Neither had there ever seemed to be a ‘type’ for the victims -- contrary to the usual pattern of a serial killer -- though all of the later victims could be described as unsavoury characters.

Upon further investigation, Coulson’s team learned the identities of the two Carnival archers, along with those of the elder archer's partner and the younger archer's older brother. The team also uncovered some fragments of the Bartons' history. Of particular importance, essentially the first tile to fall in the domino effect of the Bartons' childhood upheavals, was that their drunkard father had managed to kill himself and his sons' mother in an automobile accident when the boys were five and eight. With no other relatives, the two young boys had then spent six years bouncing around in the system -- three foster homes, two orphanages, and one short stay in a home for delinquents -- before doing what every little boy or girl dreams of, and running away to join the circus.

Their troubles had not ended there, however; for while the elder sibling, Barney, was old enough and large enough to do proper work such as cleaning animal enclosures and the like, eleven-year-old Clint had been small for his age and quite unable to "pull his weight" so to speak, which had not sat well with the other folk. At least until the Swordsman caught Clint playing with a set of throwing knives.

According to the elderly carnie woman Phil spoke to -- a treasure trove of information -- Clint’s "technique was shit-awful but him hitting the mark was a sure bet." As she'd rambled on, reminiscing about "the good old days," Phil picked up more than a few disturbing snippets regarding Clint’s ensuing apprenticeship to the Swordsman and Trick Shot. Clint would be made to practice, practice, practice for hours on end with no respite, until either his numb fingers dropped bow, arrow, or blade, or his body failed utterly to complete the complicated series of twists and contortions he'd been assigned, and it wouldn’t be uncommon for one or the other of the two men to take "his belt to the laddie" if Clint missed his target, regardless of fatigue or injury.

After the brothers had been with the Carnival for a couple years, and Clint had been incorporated into his mentors' act as "The Amazing Young Hawkeye", the three would disappear for hours at a time after their final act of the evening or on days when the Carnival was closed. When they returned, the two adults were very pleased with themselves, flushed with drink and laughing loudly, but the young teenager was pale and shaking, at least initially, and his brother, who sometimes went along with the trio, had been heard to tell Clint to "man up and grow a pair." That had gone on for years, until apparently one or the other had not been satisfied with whatever they were making with those side trips. When the younger Barton was around 20 or so, one of his mentors had stolen the night's take from Carson's office; Clint had caught him in the act and tried to stop him.

The take was the combined earnings of all the carnies for the night, and stealing it hurt everyone in the Carnival, but neither Clint’s older brother nor Clint’s mentors had cared about that, "the greedy sods". They'd beaten Clint half to death before grabbing their gear and skipping town. The younger Barton had been devastated by the betrayal, not only by his mentors but by his brother, Barney, too, and quit the Carnival once he was well enough to survive on his own. The old woman had no idea what had happened to Clint afterward, and seemed genuinely saddened by the events despite the jaded and world-weary tone with which she’d delivered portions of her tale.

Phil agreed it was a shame and had moved on. The old woman’s story helped fill in the blanks in the  rumours Phil had run across in certain circles about a mercenary known as Hawkeye who was strangely particular, for a hired killer, about the jobs he accepted. He had rules, the whispers said, and it wasn’t unheard of for the ‘client’ to get offed rather than the mark if the job violated one of Hawkeye’s rules.

Clinton Francis Barton had seemed almost relieved when Coulson showed up on the doorstep of his motel room. Not that the archer had enjoyed giving up his autonomy and independence to bow to the authority of another. But he had, in his own, highly illegal way, been trying to protect people and make the world a slightly better place by removing some of the nastier scum from its population. It just so happened that he'd found a way to get paid to do something he was rather good at anyway.

Clint’s quirky sense of humour and irrepressible, sometimes downright childish good nature had miraculously survived the hardships he had endured, and Coulson elected to offer Barton a chance at redemption, a way to make up for some of the harm he'd done whilst in the hands of Trick Shot and the Swordsman. As a 13-year-old child broken to their rule, Clint had been in no position to refuse the orders he'd received from them, but once he'd escaped them, Clint had made an effort to avoid harming innocents, and so Phil was willing to put his neck out for the younger man.

After he'd completed the standard agent training, Phil had become Clint's de facto handler and had been “handling” him when Clint made the spur-of-the-moment decision to bring in the infamous Black Widow rather than kill her as he had been ordered.

That encounter had, in and of itself, been an experience that was amongst the most surreal of Phil's career, and he'd been around long enough to see a thing or two.

SHIELD had been tracking a number of foreign assets at the time, of which one was a woman, sightings and rumours of whom spanned several decades, known only by a codename: Black Widow. The intel hadn't seemed possible at the time as the woman's description was similar at each sighting despite the fact that those sightings were scattered across many years, usually in conjunction with the theft of impossible-to-access information or technology as well as the murders of those who had guarded it. The absurd nature of Black Widow sightings was chalked up to falsified Russian intelligence. But of course, that was before Steve Rogers had been found and defrosted, and long before it was proven that the Winter Soldier really existed, so SHIELD as an agency could be forgiven for their healthy dose of skepticism when reviewing what amounted to hearsay and rumours, especially in light of the long-standing Russian campaign of disinformation.

By that point, Barton had been with SHIELD for a few years, and had settled into his new role as an agent quite well. He wasn't one to form close attachments with his associates, but he was relaxed enough to spy and prank and cause havoc, generally expressing the mischievous side of his nature, and Coulson knew that most of it was pretty harmless rather than mean-spirited, so he ignored what he could and filed the necessary paperwork on what he could not.

Then had come that fateful mission -- triggered by intel floating up to SHIELD's awareness through the usual convoluted channels -- that had Coulson and his agent scrambling to reach the destination city first to set up surveillance and the sniper's nest that Barton would use to take out the threat.

Only, after the three weeks of surveillance, when they had confirmed that the target was indeed the elusive Black Widow and Clint had her targeted for the shot, he'd refused to take it, citing a gut feeling that the woman could be swayed. Coulson had made the call, not that he’d had much choice, to trust Clint's instincts and had given him the green light to approach the beautiful, deadly Russian.

They'd never told Phil exactly what transpired between the two after Barton walked right up to the Widow’s bolthole's door and knocked, but precisely 30 minutes after disappearing inside, the agent had popped his head out again and given the distantly observing Phil a cocky thumb's up.

Not long after, Natalia Alianovna Romanova had sauntered up to Phil's position, an unrepentant Hawkeye a few paces behind her, introduced herself, and proceeded to divest herself of her weapons: some knives, a couple guns, then more guns, several more knives, a few coiled wires, an assortment of vials, and tablets, neatly arranged in a pocket-filled roll of sturdy leather, and then a few more odds and ends that she appeared to classify as weapons but that Coulson had never seen before. It had taken her over ten minutes to remove all the weaponry from her person, after which she held out her hands to be handcuffed.

Not that Phil or Clint _or_ Natasha were under the delusion that the cuffs would actually hold her if she wished to get free, but it was a nice gesture.

After they'd returned to the SHIELD base and placed the Black Widow in a containment cell, Coulson had backed Barton's play to the Director, who then summarily made her Coulson's problem again, "Your mess, your cleanup."

Phil debriefed the Russian shortly thereafter, and to her consternation she found that Phil was utterly unresponsive to her charms. He reacted appropriately to her sharp wit and biting humour, but appeared oblivious to any of her more subtle attempts at flirtatious manipulation. She'd been rather forthcoming about some aspects and circumstances of her life, and unsurprisingly tight lipped about others. Not all of that had been her fault, Phil found out much later.

She had attempted, as best she was able, to be honest with Coulson during that first interview, but as both a thoroughly conditioned graduate of the Red Room and as a seasoned spy and interrogator, there were some things that Natasha just couldn't vocalise, could not even write down. It became clear, over the course of their conversations, that the conditioning supplied by the Red Room had been reapplied at irregular intervals over the course of her work for the Russian government. Due to a series of extended deep-cover missions that had precluded her return for reconditioning, Romanova’s conditioning and implanted memories had broken down enough for her to regain sufficient mental autonomy to not only realise some manner of the scope of her own manipulation but also make the decision to break away from her Russian masters.

Adrift, and still struggling to sort through the mental maelstrom, Natasha had done what most people in her position would have done and became a mercenary, accepting jobs as and when she needed them, remaining constantly on the run from her former handlers.

It was after a decade of freelance work, during which time her conditioning continued to degrade, that she popped up on SHIELD's radar as more than just a rumour, resulting in the mission that should have ended in her death, but instead resulted in her recruitment as a prospective agent for SHIELD.

She might not have taken the record for fastest completion of agent training but she certainly came close.

In the years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, SHIELD teams had discovered facilities scattered around the globe and in some, documentation that made mention of the Red Room and its Black Widows. Once Natasha had clearance to access those documents, she had learned of the memory implants and also found confirmation of biological alterations she had long suspected. She already knew, from memory fragments, that training in the Black Widow program had been brutal, and at least one girl from her set, if not more, was lost each year. Those who did survive were rewarded, if one could call it that, with chemical treatments of which the dose strengths and compositions -- and how the girls reacted to them -- varied each year, implying that the girls were also being used as test subjects. There had been notations in a few of the files that no one at SHIELD had understood at the time, references to "Soldat" that seemed to imply a similar use of chemical treatment, but the references were always brief and vague.

While she still did not recall the entirety of her many decades, thanks in no small part to the confusion of deciphering which memories were real and which had been implanted, there were enough recollections that could be cross referenced to actual events to lend weight to Natasha’s suspicions that they were, in fact, real memories.

Phil and Clint were, however, the only people she had ever felt even marginally comfortable enough with to speak of those memories. In one conversation, held over comms in the wee hours of the morning during a weeks' long stakeout in Laos, the darkness and quiet isolation somehow making it easier to give voice to the secrets of her past, Natasha admitted she was reasonably sure she was an orphan, but had no way of knowing other than by the snippets her Red Room instructors had let fall, apparently unaware that little ears could hear their words. She could not herself recall a time before the Red Room, but she knew she had to have been at least four years old when she was sent there as those who ran the place deemed children younger than that as requiring too much oversight to be an efficient use of the program's resources.

Another time, also during the long, dull hours of a stakeout, that time in some Honduran backwater village, Natasha had revealed that she was fairly certain she'd been born sometime in the late 1920s; she could recall being among a group of young girls, not yet teenagers, watching General Secretary Stalin extolling the virtues of socialism. She could vividly recall the excitement of both the children and their keepers at being honoured with personal attendance at the event. It was, she thought, a way for the chief to show off his cadre of beautiful and deadly little spiderlings to their esteemed leader.

The years after that, however, were much hazier, and Natasha had confessed to considerable confusion as to what was real and what was not. Some she was able to pinpoint to a given event or time period -- toppling a Czechoslovakian government, inciting Afghan unrest, a variety of assassinations in Mexico City, East and West Berlin, even the United States and Russia itself -- but many others were too vague to tie down. It frustrated her, but there was little she could do to change the situation.

Against all the odds given her decades-long history of manipulation and abuse and the years of treatment as merely a tool rather than as a human being, Natasha managed to forge a tentative connection first with Clint and then with Phil. She did not at first trust them, not really, but over time and with a lot of effort, especially by Clint, Natasha grew to rely on the two men in the field and eventually developed a proper friendship with both of them despite the lesson that had been driven into her so many times when she was a child in the Red Room: friends were vulnerabilities.

In retrospect, it wasn’t a surprise that no other handler could manage the pair. Clint was one of those highly energetic creatures who needed a firm but compassionate hand holding the leash else he'd be off pulling pranks on anyone and everyone, spying on them just because he could, and generally getting into as much mischief as he could get away with while driving the junior agents to tears and the senior agents to apoplexy. None of it was mean-spirited, but all of it meant copious amounts of paperwork and de-ruffling of feathers for Phil. But Barton was the best at what he did, and SHIELD was willing to put up with a lot worse to make use of his talents. He was also never slow to help someone when they needed it: a kind word here, a helping hand there. Clint had a good heart, and it showed. The other agents seemed to view Clint with an odd mix of exasperation and affection. He might be an obnoxious little hooligan, but he was _their_ obnoxious little hooligan.

Natasha, on the other hand, terrified both the junior agents and the senior agents, but for very different reasons. Thanks to her years as a Red Room assassin, she could beat the snot out of all of them without breaking a sweat, and in the minds of the senior agents, her loyalties were always questionable. She wasn't given much to idle chitchat, and when she did speak was either blunt to the point of rudeness or her words seemed to have layers upon layers one had to navigate through, like a maze or an onion, hunting for the kernel of truth at the centre. In fact, if she _did_ engage in idle chitchat, one had to wonder what her game was, since she just never did anything _idle_ , nothing without a purpose. The only agents who weren't half frightened to death of her were Phil, Clint, of course, Director Fury, and his assistant, Maria Hill.

The two agents were constantly in each other's space, seemed to have no boundaries with each other, and yet no one could say that they behaved like anything other than very close siblings. They were poetry in motion in the field and just as in sync out of it. They were everything a handler could ask for on mission: precise, thorough, invisible, deadly…. And everything that would drive a handler to despair off mission: pranks that had a certain distinctly Hawkeye flair for the dramatic, "sparring" that sometimes ended with broken bones for the agents foolish enough to antagonise the diminutive woman when they took her on, and enough bar crawls and other unsavoury nighttime activity to drive a handler to drink.

Phil cast his eyes back to the screen and reread the innocent-looking email for the sixth time. It was from Barton:

> _Hey Phil, me and Tasha are taking a night out of town, haven't been out since that Istanbul fuckfest. The cat-sitter got the flu. You ok to cat-sit Friday night? Might be Saturday too if we don't make it back to town. Lemme know, k?_
> 
> _\-- Clint_

The handler pinched the bridge of his nose and and sighed. He didn't even need to consult his calendar, he knew he had the weekend off. In fact, Director Fury had given all three of them the next week off. They'd been running missions non-stop for almost six months, and Nick was astute enough to know that even his best agents and handler needed a break once in awhile. Not that he'd appeared pleased to be giving them time off, but he rarely looked happy to be giving anyone time off.

Shaking his head ruefully, he hit reply and sent off a short note agreeing to cat-sit Friday and Saturday, and asking for more detail on just what it was they needed him to do. He had a stack of mission reports to read through and figured the quiet of an almost-empty apartment should suit that just fine. He expected the reply would detail the care and feeding of the assassins' pet felines, and he felt well-able to manage both.

Clint’s reply arrived within an hour, and was much as he expected, but with a bit more detail. The partners were apparently the proud parents of a male and female pair of cat siblings. The tom, named Yastrebonok, was a pretty typical cat: he liked chasing things, and climbing things, and getting into things. He also liked to be petted and given treats and have his back, ears, and tummy given scritches. The female, however, seemed a different story. Her name was Krasavica; she was painfully shy and nervous and was terrified of strangers. Clint and Natasha thought something might have happened to her before they had adopted the pair. Krasavica would likely stay hiding under their bed or in their closet for the majority of his stay, and Phil shouldn't worry if that were the case. It was normal since she didn't know him. As long as he set out food and water and left her alone, she'd be ok. It was Yastrebonok who required the attention and oversight to make sure he didn't destroy the apartment or terrorise his sister.

Phil smiled to himself at the names, definitely sensing Natasha's hand in them, and then fired off his confirmation and best wishes. They'd leave the key for him at the office and would have some fresh bags of treats ready for him at the apartment, which might be enough for him to bribe Yastrebonok into behaving.

The rest of the week passed fairly quickly for Phil. Suddenly, it was Friday afternoon, and he was finishing up his final meeting for the day. He slipped out of the conference room while the other agents were still chatting, employing all his spy skills to avoid being drawn into yet another discussion of the brewing crisis in Uzbekistan or that epic clusterfuck of a mission that had resulted in two agent deaths and four others being disavowed. He _really_ didn't want to get into any conversation about _that_ one!

Phil reached his office without incident and collected the stack of reports he planned to go over that evening. He was taking off a bit early for once, thanks to his cat-sitting duties, and wanted to head home, take a shower and grab a few things, before heading over to Clint and Natasha's for the night.

Slinging the strap of his bag over one shoulder, Phil checked his pocket to make sure he still had their house key, and then locked his office and made his escape.

The short drive home was uneventful, and there were no phone calls reporting earth-shattering disasters, alien invasions, or other catastrophes in the few minutes he spent under the hot spray. He used to love taking showers, luxuriating in the feel of the hot water and the way it made his muscles just loosen and relax, but he was far too used to taking "high alert" showers now, wash and shampoo as fast as possible before a call came in to drag him away.

Phil dressed casually in sweats and an old tee-shirt so faded that the design was no longer even legible and threw a couple changes of clothing into a backpack. His standard go-bag was all set, but there was no point in using those clothes if he could get away with sweats and tee-shirts. Tossing his toiletries into another pocket of the backpack, he threw it over one shoulder and hefted up the duffle. One last glance around his sparse apartment to ensure that he wasn't forgetting something critical, like his phone or keys, and then Phil locked the place up and piled himself and his gear into his car -- his everyday, nondescript, nothing-to-see-here, definitely- _not_ -Lola car.

The route to his destination was neither long nor complicated, and he felt a pleasant flutter of anticipation in his chest. He'd long admired the closeness that existed between Barton and Romanova, and there was always a part of him that longed for it, or something similar. But he was too notorious as a lone wolf to have found much companionship amongst the other SHIELD agents, and too conscious of the ways family and friends could be exploited by unscrupulous enemies to allow himself to become attached to anyone outside of SHIELD. It was a sad reality but less painful in the long term. He knew he'd be eaten alive with guilt if something were to happen to a lover because of him, so he avoided the entire mess by involving himself with exactly no one who could not already defend themselves. But that didn't stop him from wanting to share in such closeness, even if only vicariously by sharing the same space as those who had already achieved it.

He reached the apartment building, checked in with the security guard at the parking level's entrance, Natasha having left his details with the company years before, and then hunted out the guest stall Natasha told him about when they first bought the place. The partners’ little grey car was parked in the stall beside it, but that made sense, they'd probably caught the train and didn't want to leave the car at the station.

Phil slung the two bags over his shoulder, collected the pile of reports, and then nudged the car door shut with his hip before heading over to the elevator. Clint and Natasha's apartment was on the top floor of the building, and their level was divided into four units just like every other floor of the place. If he remembered correctly, the floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room offered a spectacular view of the city by day or by night. He was looking forward to it, he'd always found it peaceful looking out over the buildings shrouded in darkness, no hint of the hustle and bustle taking place far below.

The elevator reached the correct floor and dinged softly as the doors slid open. The place was quiet, but that had more to do with the excellent construction, thick concrete walls, and sound-proofing, than any activity that might or might not have been taking place in the other apartments. The layout was simple: the elevator shaft on one face of the building, the stairwell on the other, and a short hallway providing access to each from the four front doors with each apartment taking up one quadrant of the floor.

Making his way out of the elevator, Phil lugged his gear over to the door of the northwest-facing unit and slid the key into the lock while simultaneously pressing his thumb to the hidden scanner beside the keyhole. There was a faintly audible click as the scanner accepted his print and both allowed the key to slide the rest of the way into the lock and also slid back the cover for the full biometric scanner concealed in the wall beside the door. He pressed his left palm to the scanner and then watched patiently as the unit scraped a thin cloth-covered bar down the length of the scanner and then up again, erasing any trace of his use. Once the bar had retracted into its slot, the panel closed with another faint click. There were no fancy green lights or any other indicators that his palm scan had been accepted by the system, but knowing that the cleaning bar only deployed for accepted scans, Phil reached for the key and turned it in the lock. If the scan had failed, he'd have received a jolt of electricity strong enough to knock him unconscious when he touched the key. Security was not something either Natasha or Clint took lightly.

Phil pushed the door open with his shoulder and stepped inside, sliding the key out of the lock as he passed. As the door closed behind him, he heard the faint whirring as its physical systems reset, ready to defend the apartment once more.

He toed off his trainers and shoved them up against the side of the shoe rack just past the heavy metal front door opposite to what he vaguely recalled Clint laughingly calling "the bike room", a long, narrow storage room that held anoraks and boots and other heavy gear. Phil then turned and stepped off the cool tile of the entryway and onto the wood of the hallway. It was a lovely shade of ochre, and he imagined it would glow when the morning or late afternoon sun hit it. The walls were the same cool not-white that he remembered, some shade of steel grey blue called "Low Tide" or "Water Wings" or "Fragmented Glass".  In any event, a ridiculous epithet that Natasha had had fits of laughter over. Each room in the apartment was a different hue, but all were variations on the same basenote of blue which contrasted nicely with the warm glow of the flooring. In spite of the warm tone of the floor, the air was just on the cool side of Phil's ideal, but Natasha was probably more comfortable in cooler temperatures than warm, and there was a good chance that Clint, used to long and lonely vigils in high and exposed sniper nests, was the same, so who was Phil to complain?

Coulson’s socked feet padded down the hall a few paces, past the door of the "bike room" that abutted the common area of the floor and then turned into the kitchen. It wasn't the largest kitchen he'd ever been in -- he did know Tony Stark after all -- but it was a good size for two people to move around in without tripping over one another. The illusion of space was furthered by the fact that the kitchen flowed quite nicely into the dining area; only a long counter with cabinets on the kitchen side and a row of bar stools and space for knees to tuck under it on the dining room side separated the two spaces. A small table with a half-dozen chairs filled the rest of the dining space nicely without it feeling abandoned in a vast expanse or crowded up against the walls. All in all, the partners had done an excellent job of making the two areas feel both connected and comfortable. Phil approved.

As he dropped the two bags from his shoulder, dumping them beside the table, and set the stack of reports down on the wooden surface, Phil noticed a note stuck to the front of the fridge along with a large paper bag set inside a clear plastic storage bin left at the far end of the room-dividing countertop. He padded back across the wooden floor and plucked the note from the door. Whereas the previous notes had all been electronic, this one was penned in Natasha's elegant script. He spared a moment to both appreciate the beauty of the fading art, and shake his head sadly at the method by which she'd learnt it. No child should have to endure the kind of childhood she and the other Red Room girls suffered through.

Leaning back against the cool metal door of the fridge, Coulson scanned the note quickly, but it didn't have much more detail for him. It let him know that the dinners for the cats were in the fridge and the treats were in the plastic bin so that "Yastrebonok can't raid them before you get there."  The note also mentioned that even though Clint and Natasha had shut both cats up in their bedroom, it was likely that Yastrebonok had escaped, as he usually did and that while Krasavica might follow her brother out if the apartment was empty, she would likely flee back into her safe space once Phil arrived.

Phil looked around and didn't see any escaped tomcats, but he did see the feeding area for the two cats. Automatic feeders attached to two largish bowls contained some kind of dry food and were set under the breakfast bar area along with a dish of what Phil assumed was water. He didn't see a litter box around but it was possible the partners kept it elsewhere.

Shrugging his shoulders, partly in amusement and partly in an attempt to undo the knots formed from lugging the heavy duffle up to the apartment, Phil set the note down on the counter and went to re-acquaint himself with the rest of the apartment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, I have no idea when I might post another chapter. But comments and kudos are certainly a lovely way to encourage an author to get a move on and are greatly appreciated. If you would like to leave my soul-sister some encouraging words, I'm sure she would appreciate that as well. 
> 
> Thank you for reading my first Marvel-verse piece. I hope you are enjoying it so far. 
> 
> ♡♡♡


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